He said roadblocks were set up by pro-Gbagbo youths who checked voting cards and blocked likely opposition voters, and he suggested that might affect "the credibility of the vote".
Election authorities had already delayed announcing results to check votes from nearly 2,000 polling stations for fraud, but eventually threw out less than 12,000 ballots.
Chattering and train sounds and animal noises ricocheted around the field speakers as the music played from the stage; at the halfway point, a giant balloon pig, as large as a small plane and tagged with graffiti like "Fear Builds Walls" — and the name "Obama" next to a checked voting box on its underside — was lofted over the audience, then released into the air.
Lott's logic is simple: If Republicans worry about voter fraud, and Democrats say that voter fraud doesn't exist, he proposes, then why doesn't the United States just use the Democrat-approved National Instant Criminal Background Check System to double-check voting rolls?
But the electoral commission rejected all appeals after re-checking vote counts.
Election officials in other large states say their laws are much less ambiguous than Florida's and provide more time for checking vote totals and settling disputes.
The election monitoring group Oy Ve Otesi is also expected to triple-check votes.
And the Board of Elections staff checks the voting logs from Election Day to ensure that whoever mailed in an absentee ballot did not go to the polls on Nov. 7.
Steele said the Oscars voting would remain entirely secret, but Robertson indicated that PwC might, in a pinch, reserve the right to check who voted for whom.
Chris Brandt, a spokesman for Freightliner, said the U.A.W. won the right to organize the plants, in Gastonia and Cleveland, N.C., in so-called card check votes in mid-January.
